By adding a public Stardates calendar, Star Trek stardates appear in your calendar view as All Day events.

This past Thursday, Google added stardates in their free online calendar application, aptly coinciding with the worldwide release of the latest Star Trek movie. Call it the feature for Trekkies or cheap marketing maneuvering, but there’s something cool about turning regular dates into stardates in your calendar.

Despite the fact that Google went from rebellious little startup to one of world’s largest corporations illustriously called behemoth, the search monster, the search Goliath, Godzilla of search – to name just a few – the company still oozes a sense of laid-backness and friendly attitude, combined with their trademark sense of humor.

The addition of stardates to Google’s free online calendar application is the perfect example of this. Although this amusing “feature” doesn’t improve capabilities of the web application, make sure you don’t tell this to your Trekkie friends.

“Our team has been pretty excited about a certain movie premiering today. After yet another discussion of starships, phasers, and warp drives, we decided to put our enthusiasm to work and give Calendar a little boost,” the company wrote in a blog post. The search monster argues that pre-loading your Calendar with stardates “helps you keep track of time in this universe and beyond.”

The stardate feature is basically a special public calendar that you first need to add to your calendars list by entering stardate: in the “Add a friend’s calendar” field in the calendar list. The resulting Stardates calendar will automatically appear in your calendar list on the left, with stardates appearing as All Day events. As with any other calendar, your can hide Stardates calendar from the list or unsubscribe from it.

By adding a public Stardates calendar, Star Trek stardates appear in your calendar view as All Day events.

Christian’s opinion

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, stardate is a fictional universal absolute date system conceived for the Star Trek series. You’d be forgiven for thinking that stardates mentioned in the captain’s log narration used throughout the series are just random, made up numbers. On the contrary – stardates follow Star Trek logic, as everything else in the Star Trek universe.

In a nutshell, stardate is a decimal number rounded to a single decimal place used to replace absolute Gregorian calendar dates. Every self-respected Trekkie would urge you to check what Wikipedia has to say about stardates and then point you to an in-depth knowledge base on stardates and how they’re calculated at the Star Trek Archive.

Of course, adding stardates in Calendar isn’t just Google’s innocent addition motivated by their burning need to show the world that they haven’t yet lost touch with reality. The way I read this one, it’s a clever marketing maneuver timed for May 7 to aptly coincide with the worldwide release of the the latest Star Trek movie.

In a sense, Google is piggy-backing on the movie buzz in a hope to raise general awareness of its Calendar web application and up its profile amongTrekkies. Will it work? Yes, at least for Trekkies. You’d be surprised how many of them live among us and there are obviously more than just a few working at Google.